More from the exercise-is-good-for-you department: Regularly working up a sweat may lower your risk of having a stroke, a new study in the journal Stroke[1] has found.

It likely won’t surprise you to learn that physical activity lowers the odds of suffering a stroke, but the new research is among the first to link exercise with stroke incidents using a large population over time.

The researchers analyzed data from REGARDS (United States from the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke), a large, long-term study funded by the National Institute of Health that looks for reasons behind high incidents of stroke in the Southeast.

About 27,000 African-American and white adults ages 45 and older who had a stroke participated. Subjects reported their activity level over a five-year period and were classified either inactive (no exercise), moderately active (exercising one to three times a week) and active (exercising four or more times a week).

Inactive subjects were 20 percent more likely to have a stroke than participants who exercised four or more times a week, according to the study.

“These findings confirm past results of studies done in only men or only women in limited geographical areas,” said study author Virginia Howard, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology the University of Alabama, Birmingham. “Our study was able to use a larger and more diverse population to show that participating in regular physical activity is associated with lower stroke risk.”

The researchers add, however, that the exercisers’ risk rose when obesity, smoking, hypertension and other stroke risk factors were calculated into the results. In other words, physical activity helps, but it won’t necessarily override other lifestyle choices and heredity factors.

Additionally, when the researchers broke down the data by gender, men who exercised four times a week had a lower stroke risk than those who worked out less, but no such correlation was found for women.

“This could be related to differences in the type, duration, and intensity of physical activity between men and women,” said Howard. “And this could also be due to differences in the perception of what is intense physical activity.”